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Monday, January 2, 2017

Book Review: Hillbilly Elegy

Title:Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of
a Family and Culture in Crisis

Author: J.
D. Vance

Enjoyment
Rating: 5/5

Source:
Audiobook from OverDrive

To kick off 2017, I want to review Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.
D. Vance, which I listened to last month. I liked it enough to buy a copy for one of my brothers and recommend it to several people.

Vance writes honestly and movingly
about growing up poor in the rustbelt. His grandparents were Appalachian
hillbillies who moved from Kentucky to Ohio with the hope of providing a better
future for their children. Vance's grandparents were able to achieve a certain
amount of financial success compared to the severe poverty they came from, but
Vance's mother and uncle struggled in the dueling cultures of hillbilly
violence and secrecy (you don't talk about domestic violence to anyone) and the
pressures of middle class life. Vance's mother moved from man to man and
struggled to hold down jobs while fighting drug addictions. Due in large part
to the loving (if still somewhat chaotic) influence of his grandparents and his
decision to join the Marines after high school, Vance made it out of Middletown,
Ohio and ultimately graduated from Yale Law School. He writes about the
challenges facing poor whites in the rustbelt; towns built up around mills and
manufacturing plants that provided upward mobility and stability for one or two
generations, but when the mill closes the town dies, and even where they remain
open, opportunity for upward mobility becomes scarce. Faced with few achievable
options, too many individuals bounce around low-paying jobs and struggle with issues
of multi-generational violence and addiction.

Though all of the details of
Vance's life are different than mine, I felt it resonate on an emotional level.
I grew up as a poor white in a small, agricultural producing town in the
Central Valley of California. A lot of the families I knew likewise struggled
with issues of domestic violence and/or divorce, drug abuse (prescription pain
pills or alcohol most common), and the challenges of a lack of opportunity and
upward mobility in a town that sends too few away for higher education and has
too few good-paying jobs for them to return to. Vance does not advocate for
Donald Trump, and I struggle to see how even a single individual was willing to
vote for that man, but I think Hillbilly
Elegy is an interesting perspective into the lives of poor whites who see
little opportunity or reason for optimism in an economy where manufacturing and
mining jobs are shrinking and where they see special interest groups advocating
for everyone except for them.